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I sound off on the Tom MacMaster disaster.

If you haven’t heard about the middle-aged heterosexual white man masquerading as a middle-aged Syrian lesbian, it seems like a plot straight out of a soap opera. Get your popcorn!

My favorite analysis came from KABOBfest, who provides a great breakdown of why MacMaster’s hoax is a serious issue and deconstructs the problematic stuff behind it:

In a queer turn of events it has been exposed that Amina Arraf, known to most as the “Gay Girl in Damascus” is no more than a contrived Orientalist avatar of one 40-year-old white man from Georgia, Tom MacMaster. The first words that came to mind upon hearing the news, were “ILAAN KOS…” but we’re trying to refrain from wasting our indignation on curses (albeit justified) and re-orient the conversation into a productive analysis of what MacMaster’s hoax means for the position of Arabs in western media.